nadel@aerospace.aero.org (Miriam H. Nadel) (12/10/89)
I am concerned about something regarding the Montreal massacre and I want to put it out for comments. Women in Thunder Bay, Ontario have organized a vigil for the victims, to mourn them, and will bar men from attending. They feel it is a 'personal, emotional event' and don't want to exclude men from the issue but want them to 'take responsibility for the issue of male violence themselves'. They don't think they can fully express their emotions and grief with men present, and want the men to organize their own event. Violence against women is a societal problem, not men's problem or women's problem. It is social values (?) that condone the degradation and 'victim' face of women. It isn't a problem that men alone or women alone can even begin to solve. A change of social attitudes is required in order to show some men that such behaviour is unacceptable. And that includes both men and women. Now, don't jump on me - I'm not saying that women are responsible for their victim-face, only that any, even tacit, acceptance or passivity with regard to any kind of victim-treatment is unacceptable. And this again requires change on both parts. You can't exclude men from mourning for victims of a sexist crime alongside women. That says, to me anyway, that this is a women's-problem - it's our grief and we have to deal with it - but it isn't a women's problem. It happens to women, but its a social problem. When we view ourselves as people, as people to whom bad things happen, when we don't segregate ourselves along gender boundaries, then we'll have come a long way towards respect for each other on the basis of our humanity. I, for one, want respect as a person, as a human being, and I want it from other persons. And I don't think I'll get it if I segregate myself outside the boundaries of people-in-general, and focus on myself as having a distinct status like woman. Sure, lots of things have happened to me in my life simply because I'm a woman, but lots of things have also happened because of the person I am. Again, to my main point, I don't think it is treating men with respect if we say to them that we can't mourn alongside you. This is a tragedy of society.
flaps@dgp.toronto.edu (Alan J Rosenthal) (12/15/89)
Beryl Logan (logan@nexus.yorku.ca) writes about a vigil mourning the victims of the "Montreal massacre" which excludes men: >They don't think they can fully express their emotions and grief with men >present, and want the men to organize their own event... [ the killings represent a social problem not a women's problem... ] >I don't think it is treating men with respect if we say to them that we can't >mourn alongside you. I don't see that this is very different from excluding men from all sorts of other events. I support the idea of women excluding men from events. I'm sure I don't have to tell the readers of this forum that most men tend to dominate most women in discussion and in other ways. We could argue forever about whether it's the women or the men's fault. (I think it's the men's fault.) The point is, I don't think you can get very far without realizing this basic fact. Even in a discussion with dozens of women and two men, you can keep track of how much everyone says and find that the discussion was totally male-dominated. Obviously we want to work to change this. We also want to work to change many other things, and I don't think we want to insist that we completely fix the male-dominated-discussion problem before making any other progress anywhere else. So then the question becomes whether or not we want men to dominate all these other women's discussion groups. I think we don't. If discussions or other events involving both women and men have a tendency to be dominated by men, and some women want to have a discussion or other event which is not dominated by men, they may find they have to exclude men to achieve this. I think this is fine. On the respect question: Well, perhaps you can't respect all of the people all of the time. To acknowledge that men tend to dominate discussion groups could be construed as a lack of respect. I think we should acknowledge it. ajr
jackson@shs.ohio-state.edu (Michel Jackson) (12/15/89)
Does anyone know if there will there be some sort of permanent memorial for the victims? I, for one, would gladly contribute to a scholarship fund in their memory. Or, we could all contribute to local organizations (like Woman Against Rape in Columbus) in their memory. ---michel jackson
HUXTABLE@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu (Kathryn Huxtable) (12/15/89)
In article <5771@yunexus.UUCP>, Bery Logan writes: [Good stuff deleted.---KAH] > Violence against women is a societal problem, not men's problem or > women's problem. It is social values (?) that condone the degradation > and 'victim' face of women. It isn't a problem that men alone or > women alone can even begin to solve. A change of social attitudes is > required in order to show some men that such behaviour is > unacceptable. And that includes both men and women. [More good stuff deleted.---KAH] I agree. In practice, in most North American households, children soak up their attitudes from a multitude of sources, including both parents. Even in families where the father is a workaholic with no time for the kids ("Cat's in the Cradle" by Harry Chapin) the kids will still absorb some attitudes from the father just by virtue of his absence. All of us are responsible for the attitudes of our society. It is *extremely* difficult to change a society consciously. I'm not entirely sure it can be done. We have to try, though. And it does no good if we slap many caring men in the face for something which is the fault of *all of us*. I understand the difficulty of sharing emotions with men present. This, too, is a hard problem. I see no easy solutions. -- Kathryn Huxtable huxtable@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu
geb@cadre.dsl.pitt.edu (Gordon E. Banks) (12/15/89)
Sadly, the women who exclude all men because the want them to 'take responsibility for male violence' are subject to the same delusion as men who will classify a woman as fit or not for a certain role because of her sex. Is the tendancy towards violence inherent in all males? Perhaps it is. But if it is, we should be taking responsibility for restraining it in ourselves and be rightly censured if we fail to do so. To see this incident as having any global significance is surely to be fooling ourselves. This Montreal loony is hardly unique. Paranoids often see themselves as being persecuted by certain groups: blacks, policemen, communists, physicists, and now women. It may serve some people's politics to see this as some societal sickness, but Lapine is right there in the groove with a lot of other crazies. Why feminists? Why not? They are visible, often take a strong position, and he saw them as taking a position against him. When he snapped, he turned his gun on his imagined persecutors: women.
suelh@druhi.ATT.COM (Sue Hendrix) (12/16/89)
In article <5771@yunexus.UUCP>, nadel@aerospace.aero.org (Miriam H. Nadel) writes: > Again, to my main point, I don't think it is treating men with respect > if we say to them that we can't mourn alongside you. This is a > tragedy of society. I agree, Miriam. My SO went to the vigil here in Boulder. In fact, he was the one who found out about it, who wanted most to go. I know that this tragedy hit him hard. We were a bit put out when the paper reported that it was attended by 30 women and 4 men. We did not believe that the sex of the mourners was that important. What was important was that *people* went. We need respect on both sides. Thank you for a fine article. -- Sue Hendrix, net.goddess att!drutx!druhi!suelh You'd get right to work if you had any sense, You know the one thing we need is a left-handed monkey wrench.
gcf@mydog.UUCP (12/16/89)
Beryl Logan (logan@nexus.yorku.ca): }I am concerned about something regarding the Montreal massacre and I }want to put it out for comments. Women in Thunder Bay, Ontario have }organized a vigil for the victims, to mourn them, and will bar men }from attending. ... }Violence against women is a societal problem, not men's problem or }women's problem. .... I don't think it is treating men with respect }if we say to them that we can't mourn alongside you. This is a }tragedy of society. But what is being grieved? Thunder Bay is a long way from Montreal, and it's more than likely that none of the women in Thunder Bay knew any of the victims of Montreal personally. Thousands of people, many of them young, are killed every day, and we don't experience grief, unless something makes them real for us. Sometimes it is media attention alone: sixty or so children are beaten to death every year in New York City, but only Lisa Steinberg was noticed. There have been plenty of mass killings in recent years. What distinguishes this one? I see two different distinctions: first, that it occurred in Canada, where these things aren't supposed to happen, and second, the overt motivation of the killer was misogyny. He said that women, or feminists, had "ruined his life." It is the second quality which makes the slaughter real for anyone who has experienced misogyny; and that experience is much more real for the object of it, than for an observer however sympathetic. What the women in Thunder Bay are grieving for is not something which happened to someone else far away but something which happened to them. Which is happening to them. When a person who experiences grief is in contact with one who doesn't, except vicariously, the former has to work at expressing her grief to the latter. The grief has to be packaged in language and gestures, all of which is a distraction from the work that the grief itself requires, which must be gone through. This, I think, is the explanation of why the women in Thunder Bay wanted to exclude men from their vigil, and I think it's a good reason. The vigil, for the women, was something different from whatever political and social action the persistence of misogyny calls for. The latter is certainly a common project; the former isn't. -- Gordon Fitch | gcf@mydog | uunet!hombre!mydog!gcf
sp299-ad@violet.Berkeley.EDU (Celso Alvarez) (12/19/89)
In article <89Dec14.120052est.5492@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu> flaps@dgp.toronto.edu (Alan J Rosenthal) raises the issue of gender domination in discussions. He quotes Beryl Logan (logan@nexus.yorku.ca) who wrote about the exclusion of men in the Montreal vigil: >>They don't think they can fully express their emotions and grief with men >>present, and want the men to organize their own event... A.J.Rosenthal comments: >I'm sure I don't have to tell the readers of this forum that most men tend to >dominate most women in discussion and in other ways. We could argue forever >about whether it's the women or the men's fault. (I think it's the men's >fault.) The point is, I don't think you can get very far without realizing >this basic fact. Even in a discussion with dozens of women and two men, you >can keep track of how much everyone says and find that the discussion was >totally male-dominated. I would read B.L.'s posting differently. It is not that women could not "express their emotions" fully if men would be present. After all, one only needs to utter her/his emotions to *intend* to express them (among other ways to do it). The problem lies with the social interpretation of actions (here, the expression of emotions). Any given group gathering is dominated by a certain dynamics for carrying out actions and, most importantly, for making sense of those actions according to a dominant frame of interpretation. As Rosenthal suggests, it is often the case that men often contribute most decisively to set the agenda of what to talk about and, particularly, *how* to say it. This unquestionably reflects a sort of gender domination in the control (management) of communication. But we should not necessarily infer from this that it is this sort of control that constitutes power. The presence of just one unwanted person in a large group may constrain what one can (or is willing) to say, but not always because one cannot express one's thoughts -- but because the outsider is exerting a sort of symbolic pressure or domination which consists of the imposition of his or her frame of interpretation (to be sure, a socially dominant frame of interpretation). A silent male in a largely female group may be exerting more symbolic power than a talkative one. Conversely, the silence of females in a male-dominated discussion may at times reflect the females' power not to accept the frame of interpretation -- simply, not follow the game. So, there are two aspects to the issue of gender domination in discussion. 1) The control of talk (who speaks when, and how one speaks); 2) The power of imposing a frame of interpretation. According to this male-dominated frame to interpret speech, the word (speaking) is often a weapon that we use to reaffirm our position. From this it follows that the women's decision not to accept men in their vigil constituted a defensive strategy not to have to deal with these two issues -- the control of communication, and the frame according to which their actions would be interpreted. In the Montreal case, the clearest evidence of gender domination is the *absence* of men in the women's vigil. But (and I would like to emphasize this very clearly), on the other hand, the presence of men would have not solved the problem. It would have very likely contributed to the fact that the women's actions (including words) would have had *a different sense*. Let us imagine that women at a vigil or gathering talk about "feminism", "violence", "aggression" and "misogyny". Let us also imagine that in the gathering they also express their emotions visibly, their outrage and a certain degree of frustration that usually accompanies social struggle. It goes without saying that those words and actions are interpreted quite differently by different groups of people -- not only because a given group may not share the experiences of another, but because both groups don't share either a common frame to *talk* about such experiences. If men shared the experiences of women, the Canadian male politician who at the Parliament referred to the massacre as something of the sort of "a senseless act of violence" would have used other words -- for instance, "yet another act of sexist aggression". The anchorman of one of the TV networks, in the first report of the massacre emphasized the fact that "again, there are no known motives for the killings". Next day, another anchorman said in an aside comment something like "one wonders why the killer carried to such an extreme their hatred for women". If one reads or listens between lines (the only sane way to interpret the news), what this man meant is that there are other, "less extreme", socially acceptable ways to express one's hatred for women. Language plays on us some very funny power tricks. To return to the vigil, in sum, if men could indeed share the grief of women (and women would perceive this sharedness), then probably the presence of male in the women's vigil would not make a difference. But my impression is that the women's decision was based on the perception that the presence of men *would* make a difference. That difference is not imaginary -- it is real, since it is perceived by women (at least, by the women in the vigil, as a collective; whether all women felt it this way or not, that's another issue). Men (also as a collective) cannot ask to be included in an act of grief or discussion of which they are the primary visible source. Who can guarantee that any of the men at the gathering would not carry a real weapon or a symbolic weapon -- their indifference to the word "violence" or to the word "sexism"? Who could guarantee that men would really *understand* it if a woman said "we are tired of violence"? I view the women's decision not to allow men in their vigil both as an understandable act of defense and an act of resistance. The problem is that such an action may have no further social repercussions if the women involved do not find a way to invest their actions and words with power. Power in communication works both ways. Men more often than women construct what is to count as authoritative speech. This is, of course, a social issue which has to do with the dominant position of males in society, one from which they control the resources of communication. But the symbolic power of a marginalized group may be of a different sort -- for example, by refusing to enter the game on specific occasions, women may be signalling that the premises of male-dominated discourse (asserting one's position through rhetoric argumentation, condescending, trying to discredit the opponent, etc.) are flawed. The problem is that female strategies to conduct action and talk often *do not count* as authoritative, legitimate ways. One way to empower a marginalized discourse is to make it enter the dominant discourse. Another one -- the one chosen by the women at the vigil -- is to cultivate the group's language in isolation, in in-group action. The convenience to adopt either strategy depends ultimately on the group's decision. The outsiders' act of questioning whether the women's decision to exclude men was appropriate or not is highly irrelevant. Perhaps it would be more productive to examine and question the social conditions that made possible such decision, in order to understand it. Celso Alvarez sp299-ad@violet.berkeley.edu